Welcome back, DEE-troit

Who were those guys playing the Philadelphia 76ers last night at the Palace? It was like watching an all-new team on the floor. Carlos Arroyo? Carlos Delfino? And some guy named Darko? It's hard to knock much that Larry Brown did in Detroit the last two years, but one of his biggest shortcomings was failing to get much from the bench players.

Sure, you could say Brown kept them glued to their seats because they couldn't play (or weren't practicing hard), but don't you have to use the regular season to find out what you have? The Pistons came close - damn close - to winning another NBA championship last year, but would they have been even better if Brown had kept the roster fresher by giving the reserves more playing time?

On offense, the Pistons played like a team that shed Brown off its shoulders. Enjoying their new freedom, they ran up and down the floor to create easy baskets, and rode Richard Hamilton's hot shooting touch (as Chuck Daly's Bad Boy teams used to do) while no one in a 76ers jersey could stop him. And the defense didn't seem to suffer too much with the new system, either. How do you get all those easy fast-break baskets if you're not blocking shots and rebounding misses?

Of course, you can't get too excited when there are 80 more games to go. And Philadelphia had to be tired after playing Milwaukee the night before. But that's the NBA. The Pistons looked like a team that couldn't wait to start the new season last night. All those so-called experts who picked Indiana or Miami to win the Eastern Conference could look pretty stupid in June.

▪ ▪ And was that a big middle finger Rasheed Wallace was giving to the NBA's new dress code? A baseball cap, bomber jacket, blue jeans, and sneakers? (I wish I could find a photo.) As a guy who hates tucking his shirt in, I salute you, 'Sheed.